Wow, I didn’t expect to find this game so aggravating! Where do I even start? I guess let’s give credit where credit is due first -
Man, is this game ever nice to look at. There is just so much excellent camera work and beautiful surreal imagery here, it’s really great. I love the use of extreme long shots to make the player feel small and show off the colossal environments, they remind me of some of the epic shots from the original God of War, which I don’t see used very often in fixed camera games! The art and camera direction are really the main reason this is getting a positive review, although I will note that the soundtrack is quite good as well, although not quite memorable, strong enough to play an important role in the atmosphere of the game.
And sadly…that’s really all I have to say to recommend Heartworm to anyone - as an atmospheric piece of art, certainly not as a game.
Heartworm somehow manages to take inspiration from the old greats like Resident Evil, Silent Hill and Fatal Frame and deliver a tiresome slog that misuses and dare I say even abuses fundamental pillars of the fixed camera survival horror branch. How on earth can a game designed around exploration manage to dissuade players from exploring?! I never would have imagined this to be possible before playing Heartworm. Now I know I just finished complimenting the camera work, but it’s got a serious role to play in this issue.
Take the original Silent Hill games for example. Carefully chosen camera angles are used to frame important items, notes, or other points of interest. That’s one of the main benefits to using fixed cameras. This can be used to establish mood and tension as well of course, prevent players from seeing around corners and force them to creep slowly into the unknown. If you play fixed camera horror games then you already know all of this, so why am I talking about it? It’s because Heartworm really overdoes it. I lost track of how many dead ends were framed gloriously to focus my attention down the way into…
…nothing. I’d run all the way to the end of the camera's line of sight clicking to explore along the walls and the best I would get was a flaccid character dialog line stating “there’s nothing here” or “the drawer is empty”. Now maybe this seems nitpicky, but when the environments are all massive and all the dead ends (of which there are a LOT) are framed as though they are important, it starts to really betray one of the core principles of survival horror, which is to explore everything. There’s a suspicious lack of items to actually pick up in the game which makes this issue worse. By the middle of the second area I was consciously refusing to check corners as I had been so worn down by there being no reason to do so. And by the third area I had returned to checking them just to verify how obnoxiously empty the environments were and yeah, it was just as bad. Why frame 2 different dead ends under the same staircase with these evocative camera angles that encourage players to go investigate if there’s nothing there? Maybe just don’t let us go under the staircase then.
The weird thing here is that there IS in fact a fair bit of unique character text you can get from exploring and checking out these corners and dressers and stuff, but…it’s almost all meaningless. It adds nothing. Why put so many interactable things if they don’t at least serve to build the environment, the atmosphere, develop the character? Don’t get me wrong, those all DO exist here too, but they are lost in a sea of worthless text, massive landscapes that take ages to get across and dramatic but pointless camera angles so they just end up being not really worth digging for.
As you can tell, this really bothered me, and let me point out that survival horror is my favorite genre. I have been playing these types of games since the genre began and I really value the subtle developments that happen through investigative exploration, learning how your character views the things you interact with, gaining more insight into the environment, being rewarded with subtle depth for taking the time to investigate. This is not a case of not “getting” the slow burn of these games. This is a lack of substance to burn.
Another core aspect of survival horror is being able to choose when to engage enemies and when not to. And that too is a mess here. Technically, you can bypass most enemies, but most of them have some annoying move they can do that either blocks your path or slows you down and essentially forces you to engage. Dogs are too fast, statues literally create walls you can’t pass without fighting, static people use a slow down move on you, and the jumping guys in the clocktower can stun lock you to death. I wasn’t huge on the combat here anyway, but these enemies are infuriating.
I’m actually impressed at how Heartworm applies core parts of the survival horror genre in such a way that they manage to become a detriment to the quality of the game instead of a feature.
Really disappointing.
I will leave this review as positive despite the temptation to make it negative. I think there’s some really beautiful visual stuff going on here and it is abundant. It feels like the developer put an enormous amount of love and care into the environments, but fell short when delivering a game worth playing.
For more 3rd person survival horror, check out my curator page -
https://store.steampowered.com/curator/45050657/
